(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

140
ERIC JAROSINSKI
light of Benjamin’s images of a grand erosion, erasing contours and making
things harder to read, if not illegible and invisible. He comments, for
instance, that while many of the same façades still stand in Berlin, he cannot
see them as he did as a child, because they have been worn away by
the brush of his gaze. Memories themselves are subject to a similar tactile
deterioration, with the sharpest being those that have been isolated and
preserved by shock and kept from rubbing against the others.
In reworking “Berliner Chronik” into “Berliner Kindheit um 1900”
(“A Berlin Childhood Around 1900”), the text changes drastically, losing
some of the former’s rough edges and grating frictions. Reflecting
a not uncommon view, Scholem, editor of “Berliner Chronik,” considers
the latter text a “literary metamorphosis,” in which Benjamin’s classconscious
politics have almost disappeared in the “milder,” “even more
forgiving” light he casts on his childhood. 12 While he is correct in pointing
to the near-absence of any mention of Benjamin’s evolving political
investments, often characterized as an “unorthodox Marxism” or “dialectical
materialism,” critics such as Gerhard Richter have pointed to the
way in which Benjamin enacts rather than illustrates his positions in his
autobiographical texts, challenging the reader to rethink the political
by way of “thought-images” rather than providing more programmatic
examples. 13 Certainly the final version of 1938 employs a rich and rigorous
style that is the culmination of numerous acts of writing and rewriting
of what was originally conceived as a series of short texts for a newspaper.
Benjamin began writing what would become “Berliner Chronik” in Berlin
in January 1932, then continued work on the Balearic island of Ibiza
throughout the spring. He then drew on this material to write “Berliner
Kindheit” throughout the fall, completing an early version in 1934, finalized
four years later while he was in Paris. Despite numerous efforts to
secure a publisher, much of “Berliner Kindheit” never made it into print
in Benjamin’s lifetime. 14 Though on its surface it does in fact seem less
political and more literary than “Berliner Chronik” — it is certainly more
“polished” — the carefully constructed rhetorical quality Scholem detects
can also be seen to stage some of Benjamin’s most pressing political concerns,
particularly those arising from new technologies of representation.
At the time of Benjamin’s childhood, he knew for instance that photography,
like the railway station, was already becoming out of date, giving way
to the cinema. This is expressed in the downward movement critics have
traced in “Berliner Chronik,” a digging and sinking into the depths of the
past. Though not free of the dust and dirt of “Berliner Chronik,” “Berliner
Kindheit” is marked by a gentler touch, if not a state of suspension.
The digging hand of the archaeologist remains, but it is also brought into
contact with the hovering eye not unlike that of a movie camera, as Benjamin’s
reworking of his childhood memories also suggests a necessary
though enigmatic reconfiguration of critical capacities in modernity.